“Several months ago she did. She liked to travel. Every two or three years, just about, she’d go abroad. Europe, usually. Three or four times to America.”
“The Southwest.”
“The last time, yes, to the Southwest. That was back in October . . . no, it was November, I think. Nell always liked to travel in months when it wasn’t so touristy and wasn’t so expensive.”
November, thought Jury. The same month in which Fanny Hamilton had gone to the States. “Did she talk about it? Did she meet anyone in particular? Did she seem her usual self when she came back? And since then?”
“Do you think something happened in the United States? I believe she went to—Arizona, possibly. Yes, she mentioned—wait a moment, what was the area?” Annie Landis frowned mightily, trying to remember. “It sounded more like an intersection than a state. . . . Oh, yes. Four Corners. Where four states came together. I think she said you could stand there and put your foot in all four states. Utah, Arizona . . . New Mexico? I forget the fourth.” She shook her head. “Well, that’s all I recall her mentioning. Nell really didn’t chatter about things the way a lot of us do. Well, the way I tend to do.”
Jury doubted that, very much. “But there was no reason to believe that anything had—happened to her, that she was acting differently, or anxious, or—”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
“What about your son?”
Macalvie’s question came out of left field, surprising both of them.
“My son?”
“I expect he knew her, didn’t he?”
Annie said, “Knew her, yes. Slightly. But he’s only twenty-four, Mr. Macalvie.” She smiled. “I doubt she’d have held much interest for him.”
“What sort of contact did Jimmy have with her?”
Her smile indicated she thought this line of questioning pretty useless, but she said, “Very little. Occasionally, he’d drive her somewhere. To the shops and so forth. She hadn’t a car, see. And if she needed a lot of groceries it was hard for her, with the buses and all.”
Macalvie had his notebook out. “Where was your son on his way to this evening?”
Her expression changed with the reminder of the earlier scene. “The pub. Probably the Pelican, since it’s where he’s likely to meet his friends.”
Carefully, Macalvie wrote this down. Like an edict or like a sentence, Jury thought.
“But I don’t think Jimmy can help you much, Superintendent.”
“Maybe not.” Macalvie’s smile was a flash in the dimness. “Still, I might just have a word with him.”
“But I don’t understand why Nell might have had some connection with this dead woman—girl, wasn’t she?—in Salisbury. It’s so hard to believe.”
“We don’t know.” Macalvie asked then, “Ever hear Mrs. Hawes mention a place called Coyote Village?”
Annie Landis looked surprised and then thoughtful. After considering this, she shook her head. “No.”
“It was written in her address book.” Macalvie drew the small leather book from his pocket and reached it across the tea trolley. Annie Landis took it, slowly leafed through it. Macalvie went on: “My assumption is, Mrs. Hawes might have picked that up in the United States since the only numbers in it turned out to be in New Mexico.”
“No, she didn’t.”
“Pardon?” Macalvie raised his eyebrows.
“I’m just telling you she didn’t get it there.”
“I think she must have, Mrs. Landis. If you look on the inside of the back you’ll see a bit of the price tag is still stuck to it—the bit that shows a dollar sign. It must have been bought in the States.”
Annie reached out and returned the notebook. “I’m not saying it wasn’t bought there; I’m saying it wasn’t Nell’s address book.”
“She could have had more than one.”
“Of course. But this one wasn’t hers. Look at it.”
Macalvie looked at it and frowned. “So?”
“It’s leather, Superintendent. Nell never bought anything made of leather or any animal hide. She was quite adamant about it. She was a vegetarian, too. Animal exploitation was one of the very few things I would ever see her get truly angry about.”
Macalvie was staring down at the little directory. “It’s very small. Perhaps she didn’t notice—”
With undisguised annoyance, Annie Landis said, “Didn’t notice? Superintendent, she didn’t even wear leather shoes, and that’s not easy; you have to go to a bit of trouble to find shoes totally absent of leather. Didn’t notice?” She looked away, shaking her head in wonder at such a misconstruction. Men, her expression might have read. “You’d be better off not trying to force the facts to fit your theory.”
Jury’s mouth nearly dropped open. He coughed to mask a bark of laughter. Macalvie? Force facts? Pigs might fly.
She continued as she pulled a clip earring from her ear and rubbed the lobe. “Wouldn’t it be more sensible to accept the obvious?”
It was the first time Jury had ever seen Macalvie look at a witness with open admiration. He smiled as he asked, “And what’s the obvious here, Mrs. Landis?”
“That it belongs to somebody else. And call me Annie.”
• • •
WHAT JURY ADMIRED about Brian Macalvie was that the man never wasted energy in trying to justify himself—his theories, his assumptions, his mistakes (mistakes, of course, being rare). That Annie Landis had in a sense bested him (an occasion even rarer than Macalvie’s making a mistake) had surprised him, but did not bother him. Annie, thought Jury, was absolutely wrong about one thing: Macalvie never cut the facts to fit the theory. Never. His theories were sometimes outlandish, but even those were, in the end, not really strange at all, not when looked at from another perspective.
They were at the bottom of the steps and walking along the quay where the mists from the Exe threaded along the bank and under the bridges, before Macalvie commented on what she had said. “Why was I assuming it was hers?”
Jury stopped. “The address book? Pretty obviously because it was found in Nell Hawes’s flat. A scrawl, a few numbers, a couple of words. The point is, there was no reason to believe it belonged to somebody else, so you’d hardly have the damned writing analyzed, would you?”
“Whose? Whose is it? If she picked it up somewhere, found it, whatever, it must have been in the States—it was sold there, at least. The numbers are from there. . . . ”
Jury saw fog-shrouded lamps ahead, flickering like old gaslights, a cluster of buildings, people. “Where are we going?”
“The Pelican.”
As if he didn’t know.
3
THE PUB LOOKED as if the river mist had been skimmed from the water and blown inside, the way smoke hung like a ceiling and threaded its way in and around the customers. The Pelican wasn’t too crowded, but crowded enough for the collected voices to dull the sound of the throbbing jukebox. Despite the smoke, the place was bright with light and color—color of clothes, of the jukebox sending up rainbow reflections, of glass globes on the tables, sheltering candle flames—red, gold, blue.
Jimmy Landis, still with his coat on (which Jury thought interesting, as if the lad might have to leave suddenly), was drinking at the bar with a friend. “What’s this in aid of, Macalvie?” Again, thought Jury, as if I don’t know. But he persisted. “You don’t really think the kid can help?”
Macalvie didn’t respond, beyond telling Jury to find a table; he just walked up to the bar and Jury watched him produce identification, and motion for the boy to follow him over to where Jury was sitting. There was no sheltering from the noise. The only empty table Jury could find was by the wailing jukebox. But Macalvie liked jukeboxes; liked them, that is, as long as they played “his” music: Elvis, the Beatles, Frank, Patsy. Presently, some country-western singer was sawing off several bars about his woman packing up and driving off. They were always setting off like this in American country music—women leaving men and men leavi
ng women alike, piling their bags in cars and taking off across country. Was it all those miles of roads that made for all this broken-hearted travelling?
“Superintendent Jury,” said Macalvie, introducing Jimmy Landis. “Scotland Yard’s CID.”
Jimmy Landis smiled the ghost of a smile, nodded, and sat down with his half-full bottle of lager; he polished off most of that immediately. Wheeling colors from the jukebox seemed to run like little rivers across one side of the boy’s face.
“Mrs. Hawes?” he repeated the name Macalvie asked him about. “A friend of Mum’s. I scarcely knew her.”
“You drove her around.”
“Sometimes. How did you—?”
“Kind of chauffeur.”
“Sometimes. She lived alone.”
“Like your mother.”
Macalvie’s tone was level, almost expressionless. It was guilt, Jury supposed, that brought Jimmy Landis’s head down to study the bottle of lager and moved his fingers to pick at the label.
“Something wrong?” asked Macalvie.
Jimmy. Mid-twenties, his mother had said, but he looked so young, or perhaps it was the look of fear in his eyes, the near-transparency of his skin. His skin had a pallor that made him seem all the more vulnerable. It was the way in which Jury had seen his mother’s face, her complexion from which all the color had fled. Jimmy Landis’s skin was like his mother’s; Jury imagined the boy often took on his mother’s coloration. It made him think of a London sky during those fleeting moments between first light and real sunrise when the sky is wiped clean of all color, between that first line of gold and the rising sun. Looking at Jimmy sitting there, trying to hunch down into his coat, Jury thought of the bleak skies on a winter’s day in Newcastle where his cousin and unemployment lived, and the hunched figures of boys grown old from the dole and from drink.
Then he realized that the connection here was another Jimmy, the snooker-playing Marquess—also dark, thin, and tall. From there it was only a bleak winter road back to Old Washington and that bed where Helen Minton had lain, her arm dropped over the side, hand almost sweeping the floor. He had never really been aware before that Helen had looked, in death, like the portrait of Chatterton. Chatterton with his icy, pale skin. All of this washed over him in a few seconds of looking into the face of Jimmy Landis.
The boy exploded. “I don’t get it. What is this? You talk about Mum; you talk about Nell. What is this? It was her heart. Why does this need Scotland Yard? For God’s sake!” he added for tough emphasis.
“We just had tea with her,” Macalvie continued. “With your mother.”
Nothing. Grimly, Jimmy picked at the beer label.
“Hated to see it go to waste.”
Jury breathed, “Macalvie, come on.”
“Your mother’s sick, we were told.”
“So what’s that got to do with anything?” Even the reflection of the jukebox’s pulsating colors fled from his face. It looked bleached.
“For you, kid, I’d think it would have to do with everything.” When Jimmy didn’t respond, Macalvie sighed, said, “Tell us what you know about Helen Hawes.”
“Nothing. I told you. Just drove her a few times to get groceries, things like that.”
“In total silence.”
“What?” Jimmy frowned up at him, head still bent.
“You never talked. Never.”
“Well, for Christ’s sake, of course we talked.”
“So?”
“Not about anything that makes a difference—”
“How would you know that?”
Jimmy’s wail of frustration far outshone the country singer’s rendition of “Walkin’ After Midnight.” “The weather. My mum. My job. Look, what is this?”
Jury cut in. “Sometimes you hear things that don’t register at the time. She might have talked about herself, people she knew, trips she took. That’s all we mean, Jimmy.”
Macalvie said, “I need a drink.” He got up.
As he rose, Jimmy looked from one to the other, mustered enough sarcasm to ask, “So what is this? Bad cop, good cop?”
“No. Bad cop, bad cop.” Macalvie nodded at Jury. “Be careful. He turns on you.”
Watching Macalvie walk off, Jimmy then looked at Jury as if he were, indeed, souring right before the boy’s eyes. And he asked it again, the only question left in the world: “Look, what is all this? Am I suspected of something?”
“No. This death is not totally explicable, that’s all.” In fairness to Macalvie, Jury kept his tone level, though unthreatening.
“You mean it wasn’t her heart?”
Jury looked over toward the bar, where Macalvie was standing three deep with the other customers demanding attention from the one girl who was working the beer pulls. The crowd in the Pelican generated a lot of heat and there was the pervasive feeling of hot breath and warm beer. Jimmy Landis still hadn’t taken off his coat. Neither had Macalvie. Macalvie, Jury always thought, must sleep in his coat. Well, they had something in common.
He answered Jimmy’s question. “Yes, probably. But a lot of things can bring on an attack. Did you know Nell Hawes well enough that her death affected you?”
“If you mean, was I sorry—yes, I was sorry.” He continued to strip away bits of the label on the empty ale bottle. “Nell was nice.” He looked up and as quickly looked down again. “Talked a blue streak, though.”
“Really? Your—everyone else said she was rather quiet. Reticent.” He had not wanted to mention Jimmy’s mother.
“Yeah. Well, for some reason she talked to me. You know, when I was driving her to Sainsbury’s or somewhere. The chauffeur. You know. Anonymous.” He smiled for the first time since he’d sat down.
Jury returned the smile, said nothing.
Jimmy shrugged, as if disdaining his own insight: “Except probably it wasn’t that. See, Nell didn’t have any kids.”
Although he certainly hadn’t judged the boy to be lacking in insight, still Jury was a little surprised by this comment. Also, by Jimmy’s implied admission that he had filled for Nell Hawes a role that he was failing at with his own mother. If he had been Macalvie, he would immediately have asked him about those rides and what Nell Hawes might have told him. Well, he wasn’t Macalvie, and he didn’t even know why he said what he did:
“When I was a kid my mother had a friend that I used to go with every week to the park. I mean one of those little green squares surrounded by terraced houses that residents only were allowed to use. You had to have a key to get in. She had one, and she’d unlock the gate. I always thought this was—I don’t know, incredible. Wonderful. To have a key that unlocked the park gate.”
Jimmy had stopped scraping the label with his thumbnail and his eyes were intent on Jury’s face. Jury hadn’t noticed before, since the boy had been keeping his head down, the color of his eyes. Darker green than his mother’s, more intense.
“This woman loved flowers, but she was nearly blind. Not totally, but forms, she told me, swam together when she looked at them. She couldn’t distinguish between the little benches in the park and the trees that overhung them, much less between the various kinds of flowers in the beds there. And she had been a painter, a watercolorist, and a very good one. Her name was Amy and she was known for her courage. No one ever heard her complain, or get angry. No one ever saw her cry. I couldn’t believe Fate could play such a horrible trick on someone. It was like a pianist having his fingers paralyzed; or a runner having his legs cut off; or a singer losing her voice.” Jury nodded toward the jukebox. Jimmy looked too, both of them hypnotized by its swimming colors—oil mixing in water—and the throbbing voice, still, of Patsy Cline. Someone in here really liked Patsy. “Like Patsy Cline being struck dumb. Well, what Amy liked was for me to describe the flowers, that is, tell her what kinds were planted in different seasons, and then she’d paint them. They were remarkable; they were so true. ‘The hand remembers,’ she used to say. And then after she’d done that, she’d paint what she
could actually see. This turned out to be blobs of colors. Colors all running together. And once, only once, did she get so frustrated she threw her paints and her brushes down and chucked her book of watercolors straight across the grass. ‘Oh, God! That’s all I see! Just a lot of melting colors!’ She was crying, she was nearly wailing. ‘I want to see edges, I want to see outlines, but all I see is melting colors.’
“And something inside of me just—exploded. I started crying, but not out of sympathy or empathy. I was furious, more and more furious, not at her but at life in general. ‘I wish I could see that!’ That stopped her, stopped her cold.
“She looked at me, that is, as well as she could do, you know—a little out of kilter, a little squint-eyed. ‘See what?’
“ ‘A lot of melting colors. But no! I have to see everything!’ And this seemed to me to be the most unjust and outrageous thing—that I had to see everything. Hard edges, outlines. We were both crying then, and then we were laughing. I asked her not to tell my mother, I don’t know why. I told myself it was because I didn’t want Mum to think I’d been callous, yelling at blind Amy, making her life harder . . . but that wasn’t the reason. I still don’t know the reason.”
Jimmy’s eyes were still on him, childlike in their intensity. Jury recalled the little park, the dark green of the September trees, the cool ferns and damp mosses. His eyes were that shade of green, exactly. He started to say something, but stopped.
They listened to a few bars of “Crazy” and Jury said, “Nell Hawes. Anything you can remember, tell me.”
“You mean that trip she took?”
“That. Anything.”
“It’s been a few months.”
“Things come back,” said Jury, wryly.
“She really liked it, the West. Or the Southwest, I expect it was. Colorado, New Mexico . . . Santa Fe, and—what was the name of the other place . . . ?”
“What about Santa Fe?” asked Macalvie, back with two pints and a bottle of ale. He sat down, still with his coat on, drank off nearly half his pint.
“I think she liked it because it’s mystical. She was telling me about ‘channels’ and ‘auras,’ stuff like that.” He raised his bottle. “Cheers. Oh, Taos. That was the other place she liked. It means ‘the way,’ she told me. Chinese, or something. Very mystical she thought the Southwest was.” Jimmy drank and thought. “Nell was religious. Or spiritual, I expect you’d say. ‘Everything runs together,’ she’d say. She said the American Indians had a lot to teach people. She talked about a ‘rainbow path’—something one of the tribes believed. I think she said it was like a path between the earth and the sky.”
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